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What the Frick is a Semicolon?!: A Super-Easy Guide

Brooke Schwartz
3 min readMay 1, 2018

As a semicolon enthusiast, people frequently come to me with their Semicolon Snags, asking me where and when they can use a semicolon and asking if it’s really that thing between a comma and a period.

Let me get this out of the way: A semicolon is not a comma, and nor is it a period! It has qualities of both, and it also has unique qualities that no other piece of punctuation possesses. It is truly a glorious type of punctuation and should be revered among any who enjoy the English language.

Now, the semicolon can act as a type of comma under certain circumstances. For example, it can be a kind of “super comma” when listing things to distinguish between when you’re listing a new thing and when you’re just describing a list. Here’s an example:

I went to the store and got apples, which were the reddest I’d ever seen; oranges, which were already beginning to rot; bananas, which were not yet ripe; and Tide pods, for my DISHWASHER.

As you can see from this example, I used a comma when describing the object, but then used a semicolon to distinguish between each object so that the reader could not get confused. In other words, the semicolons served as a type of barrier between each object to show that I was moving on to a new description. It’s possible to write the sentence without…

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Brooke Schwartz

Professional writer, editor, and tutor; social justice advocate; Orthodox Jew; dedicated Grammar Auror